Blogs & Media

Submitted By: Mary Ensch

Before growing a beautiful garden, one must first understand the basics of soil and the vital services it provides to plants in addition to structural support. Most notably, soil supplies plant roots with a source of air, water, and nutrients and insulates them from extreme temperature fluctuations. But what exactly is healthy, beautiful soil?

Until recently, a soil’s health was measured mainly in terms of its physical and chemical properties: its texture, structure, pH, mineral content, and so on. Today, attention has shifted to include something else as well: the ecology of the soil. Soil is a habitat for countless organisms, from microscopic fungi and bacteria to larger macrofauna, such as earthworms, centipedes, slugs, snails, etc. And we now know that these organisms—and the organic matter that sustains them—are key to the long-term fertility and viability of the soil. A healthy soil is also one that is not eroded, exhausted, or polluted. Poor agricultural and horticultural practices such as over-tillage have led to widespread soil degradation. Luckily, more and more people are embracing sustainability in every facet of their daily lives, from the clothes and household products they buy to the food they eat and the way they grow their gardens.

Water scarcity is a problem so vast that it already impacts over 1.2 billion people. This is approximately one-fifth of the total world population. Water scarcity arises when a country’s or region’s annual water supply is less than 1,000 cubic meters per person per year. A further 1.6 billion people, approximately one-quarter of the world’s total population, are in a state of water stress and moving quickly toward scarcity. Water stress occurs when a country’s or region’s annual water supply is less than 1,700 cubic meters per person per year. In the US, each person has 2,500 cubic meters per person per year. This high water withdrawal has already led to many multi-year droughts (UN: Water for Life 2012; Global Water Security, US of the Director of National Intelligence 2002).

Water shortage and scarcity exist in regions in which desertification is happening the most quickly. Based on the figure below, South Asia is in the stressed stage for water scarcity. Over-drawing of aquifers with wells or other technology has brought about this underlining scarcity. The largest sector for which water is used is agriculture. While agriculture and water are both so precious to humanity, water has traditionally been ignored as a limited resource (UN: Water for Life 2012).

The United States Census Bureau recently released the 2010 Census Report findings on public transportation use in metropolitan areas to commute to and from work. The report features data for 942 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) across the country.

Unsurprisingly New York City came in first place; the report found that 30 percent of all employees use public transportation to get to their jobs. The Bay Area came in a distant second place, with 15 percent of workers commuting via public transportation. According to The Business Journals on Numbers, which first reported the findings, only five other cities have work-related public transportation rates higher than 10 percent: Washington, Boston, Chicago, and two small cities in Florida.

The top 10 MSAs are as follows:

1. New York City: 30.5%

2. San Francisco/Oakland: 14.6%

3. Washington DC: 13.9%

4. Arcadia, FL: 13.0%

5. Clewiston, FL: 12.8%

6. Boston: 11.9%

7. Chicago: 11.4%

8. Philadelphia: 9.3%

9. Bridgeport/Stanford, CT: 9.2%

10. Elko, NV: 8.7%

You can find out more information about where your city or state ranks here:

It's hard to believe that Christmas is almost upon us. While we're busy spending all of our free time hitting the shops to get the best deals on presents, writing out all of those cards to family and friends, and trimming the tree we often forget that our holiday cheer may be harmful to Mother Nature in the long run. After all, what happens to all those trees on December 26th?

Tea staining old newspapers and using them to wrap gifts instead of traditional wrapping paper. Add twine from your garage and it'll have the look and feel of gifts from yesteryear.

Don't write on the tags of the gift bags you use. That way your recipients can recycle the bag and use it for next year's presents. And if you use bags that don't have Christmas decorations on them - such as single-color metallic bags - they can be reused for virtually any event throughout the year.

If you're worried about the impact that cutting down trees has on the environment year after year invest in a fake, pre-lit tree. Not only are they easier to set up in most cases but it'll mean one less tree needs to be cut down ever year.

Sometimes the best gifts are those that come from the heart. Give your loved ones CD mixes, scrapbooks, or other homemade gifts using supplies you already have at home. Added bonus: you can save a pretty penny while you're at it.

So don't forget to add Mother Nature to your holiday gift list this year. Celebrate the joy and festivities of the holiday season in a sustainable manner!

Submitted by: Katie LaPotin

Last month Newsweek published its 2011 Green Rankings, evaluating how green the world's largest companies truly are. According to the original release, Our Green Rankings, fully posted at Newsweek.com/green, comprise two lists, one that surveys the 500 biggest companies in America and another of the 500 largest companies in the world. Both highlight firms that are leading -- or lagging -- in environmental performance. The data -- crunched in cooperation with Trucost and Sustainalytics, two leading environmental-research firms -- assess companies' environmental footprint (including greenhouse-gas emissions and water use); management (including environmental policies, programs, and initiatives); and disclosure (including company reporting and involvement in transparency initiatives). Underlying data are drawn from a variety of sources, including the companies themselves, and vetted for reliability. The hundreds of companies tracked by Newsweek are collectively responsible for more than 6 billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions each year, nearly equivalent to all the emissions produced annually by the United States.

The top 10 green companies (and their scores) in the United States are:

Climate justice is a recent, powerful movement which has evolved out of the global climate change crisis that the world faces today. Supporters of the climate justice movement believe that the costs and benefits of economic interests should be shared equally amongst all people of all countries. What this means is that outsourcing of polluting industries to less developed countries is the incorrect response to emissions standards in the home country and that when the wind blows a cloud of soot from a factory over state lines, the soot does not just disappear, it has consequences and negative externalities. Climate change impacts have been felt for years and continue to affect people and the biosphere at an accelerating rate, yet, not much has been successful at accomplishing this necessary change in global distribution of resources and access to those resources.

The climate justice movement emerged as a result of Kyoto Protocol failures. The Kyoto Protocol of 1990, linked with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), set goals to reduce pollution, regulate emissions via caps. Climate justice is an issue because the political north developed earlier than the south through the industrial revolution and more recent technologic breakthroughs such as automobiles and airplanes.To support the seeming endless growth potential of these burgeoning economies, the north stripped the south of many valuable resources and often exploited these resources by taking far more than could be readily renewed by the ecosystem.

Today it is evident that the political south stands almost no chance of attaining the level of development that the north has reached. It is clear that a small percentage of the world's people consume the vast majority of its resources, an 80:20 ratio, actually. Eighty percent of the wealth is owned by 20% of the global human population. Thusly, resources are being consumed at a rate that exceeds what one could consider "renewable". The political south feels as though the north owes them a climate debt. The south wants to develop; people want their basic human rights to food and water access, yet many people are forced to collect water from highly polluted watersheds. The people of the political south want fair access to medicines and remedies to common but preventable illnesses such as malaria and diarrhea from toxic water sources.

The arguments for climate debt can be expressed ethically, scientifically, politically, and economically. Ethically, the north has a responsibility to do everything in their power to help raise the south up and out of poverty. The south cannot afford to pay for the climate changes that they are experiencing so harshly. Scientifically, it is observed that harvests are yielding less crop and the climate is becoming unsupportive of people's subsistence; water is becoming scarce; the rain forests are struggling and the coral reefs are vanishing while island nations lose ground and southeastern Asian countries experience the intense flooding and salination of necessary riparian zones used for agriculture that has been projected by climate experts and the IPCC (International Panel of Climate Change. Based upon this empirical evidence, the north absolutely ethically should settle the debt with the south.

Politically, there is a need for an international governance body who will develop and implement important policies, monitor the execution of those policies, and call free riders to justice for their inequities. This is difficult to accomplish because the north and south have different perspectives on the issue. The north is reluctant to face the facts and give up some of the conveniences of affluent living or to invest heavily in the research and development needed to get the world out of its current mess.

Without transparency and international governance, climate debt will be difficult to resolve. Economically, climate debt makes sense because it opens markets, drives innovation, reduces cost, and thus generates jobs and profit on a longer timescale than the immediate gratification that comes with environmental degradation for resources. However, this top-down approach has not been working very well, and bottom-up approaches from community’s to the State have been popping up around the world, including across the USA.

Arguments against climate debt mostly stem from the Political North. Typically in a capitalist system, the rich lend to the poor and ask the poor to repay them. In the situation of climate debt the poor are asking the rich to pay them back for taking their resources and their chance at development. The poor have to develop to pull themselves up out of poverty. Another argument against climate debt is the difficulty in calculating the debt. There are many factors involved, not all of which are easy to trace, measure, and assign proper accountability for. For example, pollutants in the air may be very small but in high concentrations and they come from many sources. The wind blows at all levels of the atmosphere, mixing these pollutants - and pollutants do not respect national boundaries; they go over national boundaries without consideration. Political resistance may come from a background of misunderstanding of the severity of the issue of climate justice, or for fear of losing freedoms to an intergovernmental body. All of these issues illustrate the reason for the of climate debt and the reasons for working towards settling that debt through climate justice.

There are a plethora of reasons why people do not recycle, including laziness, a lack of recycling facilities in one's area, or that they just don't believe recycling makes a difference. Yet recycling really does make a difference in helping save our environment, as the statistics below demonstrate. There are a plethora of reasons why people do not recycle, including laziness, a lack of recycling facilities in one's area, or that they just don't believe recycling makes a difference. Yet recycling really does make a difference in helping save our environment, as the statistics below demonstrate.

A plant takes a minimum of 15-20 years to grow into a tree, but takes less than 10 minutes to be felled. In addition, on average one tree can yield about 700 paper grocery bags, which will be consumed in less than an hour by a supermarket.

For every ton of paper that is recycled, the following are saved:

17 trees

275 pounds of sulfur

350 pounds of limestone

9,000 pounds of steam

60,000 gallons of water

225 kilowatt hours

3.3 cubic yards of landfill space

The average time taken by plastic bottle to decompose in a landfill is close to 700 years.

Used plastic dumped into the sea kills and destroys sea life at an estimated 1 million sea creatures per year.

Glass and plastic take the longest to decompose but are completely recyclable, therefore, it is important to purchase, recycle, and reuse both glass and plastic products.

A Styrofoam coffee cup discarded today will remain in landfill space for close to 500 years.

Aluminum cans can be recycled and reused within 60 days.

Recycling aluminum saves money, energy and manpower because preparing aluminum products from virgin metal consumes closes to 100 times the power required to recycle aluminum. If all aluminum produced is regularly recycled, the energy saved is enough to light up a medium-sized city for close to five years!

The United States is one of the world's largest producers of trash. Trash is produced at an alarming rate of 1,609 pounds of trash per person, per year.

For every product purchased, nearly 10% of the finished product contains packing material which is normally dumped.

Nearly 60-70% of waste found in dustbins can be recycled and reused, and close to 50% of the same waste can be composted.

Recycling tin, glass, and plastic containers or bottles can conserve energy to power light bulbs for 3 to 4 hours.

If these numbers don't make people want to recycle, I'm not totally sure what will!

Regardless of whether you believe that global warming exists or that we are draining all of our natural resources at an exponential rate there’s no harm in adding a bit of sustainability to your life. After all, why wouldn’t you want to give Mother Nature the same tender loving care that you give your real mother?

All it takes is one adjustment each day to make your life a bit more sustainable. Here’s a handy list of things you can do, and by just adding one of these tips to your life on a daily basis you’ll be living a sustainable life before you know it!

Going grocery shopping? Use reusable bags to transport your goodies – they can be purchased at most stores for a couple of bucks, or if you are like me you probably have a stack of them sitting around your house from various giveaways. Last-minute trip? Save your bags and bring them with you the next time, most stores now have collection boxes for recycling plastic bags on-site.

Invest in a water purifier for drinking water and use a Nalgene or other similar water bottle when travelling. You’d be surprised how much money you save by using a water purifier, and you can feel good about decreasing the amount of plastic waste we have in our landfills nationwide.

Recycle, Recycle, Recycle! It may be hard at times, but separating all of your bottles, papers and cans from your other waste goes a long way in saving the environment. Don’t forget as well to cut the rings that keep six-packs of soda together so that birds can’t choke on them.

Turn off your electronics when you are not using them. Obviously you would keep your fridge on 24/7, but does your printer really need to be on while you’re asleep? Not only does it save electricity (and you money), but it can also prolong the life of your precious devices. Same with your A/C and heat.

The Future of Food, directed by Deborah Koons Garcia, has been a key tool in the American and international anti-GMO grassroots activist movements and played widely in the environmental and activist circuits since its release in 2004. Genetic engineering of food crops is as controversial today as ever, as many of the large agro corporations that use this technology position themselves as the answer to the world food crisis and further consolidate the seed supply. The Future of Food continues to be a key tool used by activists and educators who call for increased attention to this issue.

The Ecocity The Green Urbanism lectures were recorded at the Danish Architecture Centre, December 10th 2009, in connection with the COP 15 climate summit in Copenhagen.

Steffen Lehmann is Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle in Australia and holds a chair in the Sustainable Urban Development for Asia and the Pacific council. He is also a visiting Professor at TU Munich, Tongji Shanghai and NUS Singapore. Steffen is also the founding director of s_Lab, Space Laboratory for Architectural Research & Design, which operates from Sydney and Berlin.